Some champions of reform did not rest satisfied with mere innovations and improvements.  They went so far as to discard Judaism altogether and improvise religions of their own.  Moses Rosensohn of Vilna was the first, in his works Advice and Help (’Ezrah we-Tushiah, Vilna, 1870) and The Peace of Brothers (Shelom Ahim, ibid.), to suggest a way to cosmopolitanism and universalism through Judaism.[19] In 1879, Jacob Gordin founded in Yelisavetgrad a sort of ethical culture society called Bibleitsy (also Dukhovnoye Bibleyskoye Bratstvo, Spiritual Bible Brotherhood), which obtained a considerable following among the workmen of the section.  It advocated the abolition of ritual observances, even prayer, and the hastening of the era of the brotherhood of man.  It preached, in the words of one of its leaders, that “our morality is our religion.  God, the acme of highest reason, of surest truth, and of the most sublime justice, does not demand useless external forms and ceremonies."[20] Following the organization of the Bibleitsy, and based on almost the same principles, branches of a Jewish sect, which called itself New Israel (Novy Izrail), were started almost simultaneously in Odessa and Kishinev.  In the former city, the organization was headed by Jacob Prelooker, in the latter, by Joseph Rabinowitz.  Prelooker, who after graduating from the seminary at Zhitomir became a school-master at Odessa, sought to bring about a consolidation between his own people and Russian Dissenters (Raskolniki:  the Molocans, Stundists, and Dukhobortzi).  The theme of his book, New Israel, is a “reformed synagogue, a mitigation of the cleavage between Jew and Christian, and recognition of a common brotherhood in religion.”  Rabinowitz went still further, and preached on actual conversion to one of the more liberal forms of Christianity.[21]

These sects, which sprang up in church and synagogue during the latter part of the “seventies,” were the outcome of political and social as well as religious unrest.  Alexander II fulfilled the expectation which the first years of his reign aroused in Jewish hearts no more than Catherine II and Alexander I. Those who had hoped for equal rights were doomed to disappointment.  Most of the reforms of the Liberator Czar proved a failure owing to the antipathy and machinations of his untrustworthy officials.  Russia was split between two diametrically opposed parties, the extreme radicals and the extreme reactionaries, waging an internecine war with each other.  The former originated with the young Russians that had served in the European campaigns during the Napoleonic invasion, and who, in imitation of the secret organizations which had so greatly contributed to the liberation of Germany, united to throw off the yoke of autocracy in Russia.  These secret orders, the Southern, the Northern, the United Slavonian, and the Polish, Alexander I had endeavored in vain to suppress, and the drastic measures